With three sites located across the country, Wallwork has over half a century of experience providing metallurgical heat treatment and surface engineering services to aerospace, automotive and general engineering industries.

Its site in Bury houses a specialist aerospace heat treatment facility, as well as providing commercial heat treatment for the north of England, Scotland and Ireland on a 24/7 basis.

Continuous improvement

The company strives to adopt efficient, safe and environmentally-sound working practices and follows an environmental policy that includes maintaining its ISO 14001 environmental management system by setting targets and conducting regular audits.

Having received resource efficiency advice since 2006 from ENWORKS (now part of the Business Growth Hub), Wallwork has already implemented a number of measures independently to reduce gas use, increase energy efficiency and cut waste going to landfill – saving several thousand pounds a year.

New opportunities

Following a return visit to the site at the end of 2013 by Green Growth advisor, Alasdair Dalzel-Job, Wallwork has now put a number of new measures in place to increase efficiency even further.

These include:

Installing modern burner technology onto its furnaces to significantly improve temperature performance and reduce gas use

Recycling process quench oil and installing a waste oil burner to create heat, which has now significantly reduced the volume of waste oil removed from site

Switching off energy-intensive salt pots during periods of low demand.

The company is also ensuring that energy efficiency is a key purchasing factor for any new equipment.

Cutting consumption

Based on data provided by Wallwork, its energy consumption is now 22 per cent lower than anticipated as a result of these measures, whilst production has significantly increased.

“Wallwork is a great example of how a company can increase productivity whilst reducing energy consumption by carefully examining where processes can be made more efficient – a win-win for both the business and the environment”, said Dalzel-Job.

Daniel Kenyon, environmental co-ordinator at Wallwork, said: “Heat treatment is an energy intensive process, so it makes sense for us to continually improve our efficiency, not only to reduce our impact on the environment but also to reduce costs.

“The Business Growth Hub’s Green Growth support is a key part of the toolkit we use to improve our performance. They identify new ideas and opportunities for us that we otherwise may not have noticed or been able to implement on our own.”

To find out more about the Business Growth Hub’s Green Growth service, or to read other success stories, visit the website.